Eric Dew

Entrepreneur

As owner and head coach at First Place Fencing Club, trained and developed fencers who became national and international champions. First national champion gold medalist in 2 years, next national champion 2 years later. Fencers eventually became NCAA individual champions, national college club fencing champions, and other successful results.

The ominous soul-deadening bureaucracy and politics in the departments of major corporations force creative and free-thinking people like me to work for ourselves.

I meet many startups, there are too many cool ones to name.

There's a catch-22 of trying to get customer/market traction: no one wants to talk to you because you don't have traction. It is naturally frustrating, but there's a wonderful reward once someone sees the light and understands the benefits we offer.

Seeking funding as a need for the startup as opposed to seeking funding as an opportunity for the investor.

Make something that works. Go out and find users, preferably paying users. Refine the product to meet the users' needs even better. In other words, read Eric Ries's "The Lean Startup" book.

I began to take part earnestly in the entrepreneurship space just as I was completing my MBA. It was serendipity, as well as luck favoring the prepared, that I and DataNovo found each other. DataNovo is a great company with a fantastic solution to a new, but very complex problem: the area of patent law. Patent law was changed fundamentally in 2012 with the implementation of the patent litigation reform act as part of the AIA law passed in 2011. The new act encouraged litigants to challenge each other through the Patent Trials and Appeals Board (PTAB) instead of District Courts, which were being clogged with patent litigation cases.

So now, we have new, brand new as in just created, data on how the litigants performed in PTAB and what they did (what motions did they file? when were they filed?) that may affect the results. We have sucked up that data and are now analyzing it.

At the same time, we're sucking up data on a different area of patent law, that of patent prosecution, which is filing and, hopefully, receiving a patent for inventions. Here, the key problem is verifying that the invention is truly original and unique and significant. That requires finding nothing out there like it. That's a tough problem because the process is basically trying to determine the non-existence of something by exhaustively searching for it. Well, our team at DataNovo has created a tool that can do that! And I'm fortunate to be working alongside some really great minds and truly affable people.